Words
like “surreal” and “dizzying” were used a lot over the last couple of
weeks to describe the atmosphere at major fall auctions of
Impressionist, modern and especially contemporary art at Christie’s and
Sotheby’s, as prices for individual works shattered records, hitting new
nine-figure highs, and overall sales of contemporary art surged to a
new record. At the end of the two-week marathon that started at the
beginning of the month, the tally for the two houses was $1.8 billion,
roughly double the typical level of about five years ago and triple what
it was a decade ago, when an average healthy season might net about
$500 million.
Building on a trend that first became evident as the
contemporary art market gathered steam around 2005 and 2006, the volume
of sales of contemporary art far outpaced that of Impressionist and
modern works, with contemporary art accounting for $1.25 billion at
Sotheby’s and Christie’s compared with a $527 million for the earlier
offerings. That trend subsided somewhat after the economic downturn
finally caught up with the art market in late 2008 and there was a
pronounced emphasis on blue chip Impressionists and early modern artists
like Claude Monet and Alberto Giacometti. But contemporary art has
clearly returned in full force. Last week, Christie’s led the category
with a $782.4 million total for day and evening sales, while Sotheby’s
comparable tally was $474.3 million.

Even before the sales, the number of eight-figure presale estimates on individual works was generating buzz: there were 17 at Christie’s; and six at Sotheby’s. At Christie’s all but one — Andy Warhol’s “Mercedes-Benz
W 196 R Grand Prix Car (Streamlined version, 1954)” (1986), with a $12
million to $16 million estimate — hit the mark, and Sotheby’s wound up
with nine such prices, even more than expected.
And after last
week, each house could boast a $100-million-plus price tag for its
respective top lot. At Christie’s it was $142.4 million, for Francis
Bacon’s 1969 triptych portrait of painter Lucian Freud, and at Sotheby’s
it was Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” (1963) brought
$105.4 million. It wasn't so long ago that only Picasso could break the
$100 million mark; the first painting to do so at auction was his Rose
Period “Garcon a la pipe (Boy With a Pipe)” (1905), which scored $104
million at Sotheby’s New York in 2004. Christie’s also captured the new
record for highest price for a living artist when Jeff Koons’ monumental
“Balloon Dog (Orange)” (1994) climbed to $58.4 million.
Can such astounding results possibly continue?
Immediately
after the sale, Brett Gorvy, Christie’s worldwide head of Postwar and
contemporary art asserted, “this isn’t a bubble, it’s the beginning of
something new.” In a later interview, he pointed to the progressive
growth in recent seasons, including the record evening sale last May of
$495 million, and said the house's latest sale marked “a successful
continuation."
"Basically we created a very strong foundation," he
added. "The depth of bidding on those top lots, it is not something
that is coming out of exuberance. It’s very controlled.” Gorvy points
out that between seven to eight bidders were still in the running for
the Bacon triptych even after the price hit $90 million.
Some
experts expressed reservations about the likelihood of continued growth.
Longtime New York dealer David Nash, director and co-owner of the
Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, who called last week's results
“phenomenal,” acknowledged that “it’s definitely a new era. But whether
that will last for the next sale or the one after that," he said, "I
don’t know.”
He added, joking, “I had this idea I would go to the auction and ask if I could pay with tulip bulbs.”
Nonetheless,
Nash concedes that there is a “wave of enthusiasm” for Postwar and
contemporary art. “I think it’s for a number of reasons,” he said.
“There were many first-class paintings in that category on the two
nights, and secondly it is very difficult to get first-class
Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and even early modern paintings. There
is an enormous amount of money washing around, and I think there is a
real feeling that this is a good place to to put money — into something
tangible.”
Indeed, many experts see the explosion in contemporary
prices as a supply-and-demand issue, given that the best examples of
Impressionist and modern art have largely been snapped up by major
institutions and private collection, leaving growing ranks of massively
wealthy buyers to pursue the best of what’s out there now — meaning
classic Postwar names like Bacon, de Kooning, Twombly, and Richter.
The
New York dealer Dominique Levy noted the surprising depth of the
bidding for top lots. Where there used to be slimmer pools of bidders
chasing particular categories — European buyers interested in European
artists, American collectors bidding on Americans — “the very big
difference [now] is that you are looking at a global market,” in which
new collectors are competing with seasoned buyers on a level not seen
before.
Asked whether she thought anything in particular explained
the high level of eight figure works on offer this season, Levy — who
bought Lucio Fontana’s ovoid-shaped canvas “Concetto Spaziale, La Fine
Di Dio” (1963) for a record $20.9 million at Christie's on Tuesday night
— said, “there is not just one answer for why people decide it’s the
right time to sell." She added that she believes the current level of
knowledge and connoisseurship that goes into collecting is remarkable.
"I don’t buy the idea that people are cashing in.”
Nash, however,
says he sees at least some speculative elements in the market. “I was a
little surprised to find that many of the people who would normally be
buyers were actually sellers,” he said, noting that Peter Brant and
Steve Cohen both sold major works this season. Brant was the seller of
the orange Koons balloon dog, while Cohen consigned several works to
Sotheby’s, including Brice Marden’s “The Attended” (1996-99), which took
in an above-estimate $10.9 million; Gerhard Richter’s “A.B. Courbet"
(1986), which went for $26.5 million; and Warhol’s “Liz #1 (Early
Colored Liz), which sold for $20.3 million.
Of these sales, Nash
said, “it clearly means there is a huge element of trading.” And under
the $10 million level, he added, “I noticed that there were pictures
that have just been painted or on the market in the last five years
turning around at much higher prices. I think that’s a little troubling.
But there is no doubt that there are newer buyers out there who are
willing to spend.”

Friday, December 20, 2013

By Pat Brennan

Visitors admire the painting of Rosie the Riveter.

Photograph by: Pat Brennan
, For Postmedia News

Alice
Walton was running out of wall space in her various mansions to hang
her favourite pieces of art, so she hired Montreal architect Moshe
Safdie to design an art gallery on her old childhood playground.

Safdie’s
$350 million creation - Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art - opened
in the fall of 2011 to worldwide raves. It stretches across a small
river running through a wooded valley in Bentonville, Arkansas -
population 35,000 - and has already elbowed its way on to the list of
the world’s most impressive art galleries.

And Alice Walton, the
youngest of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s four children, has filled its
bright, spacious halls with, what art critics claim, is the world’s
finest collection of American art.

You won’t have to cash in your collection of empty beer cans to see Alice’s collection. Admission is free to Crystal Bridges.

Having $22 billion in the bank and being America’s 9th wealthiest person permits such generous gestures.

Crystal
Bridges derives its name from the gallery’s two pavilions of exposed
wood and glass strung across two ponds created by the stream that runs
through the treed valley. Alice played in this valley as a child while
her dad ran his five-and-dime store on the town’s square and dreamt of
bigger things.

The art gallery blends unobtrusively into the valley’s nature.

Safdie
has designed famous buildings around the world. In Canada his
draughting table gave life to Habitat 67, the revolutionary Montreal
apartment complex sitting on the St. Lawrence River and unveiled for
Expo 67. The National Gallery of Canada, one of Ottawa’s most beautiful
buildings, is a Safdie creation. In Toronto, terminal one at Pearson
International Airport was designed by Safdie, so too is the 45-stotrey
Pantages Tower, a condominium and hotel on Victoria St. at Shuter St.
Another Safdie condo tower is under construction by Great Gulf Homes on
Lower Sherbourne St. at Queen’s Quay on the Toronto waterfront.

You’ll
recognize many of the famous paintings as you wander through Crystal
Bridges – such as Norman Rockwell’s 1943 “Rosie The Riveter” for which
Alice paid $4.9 million, or George Washington sitting for his Gilbert
Stuart portrait in 1796. She paid $8.1 million for that piece and $35
million for “Kindred Spirits,” an 1849 painting by Asher Durand. New
York City aficionados were stunned when New York Public Library sold its
prized possession at auction to buy more books. Dolly Parton attended
the museum’s grand opening to see Andy Warhol’s painting of her adorned
with large earrings.

Another Walton museum you should visit in
Bentonville is the back room of Sam Walton’s original store on the
town’s main square. That store has grown to more than 8,500 Wal-Mart
stores with annual sales of nearly $500 billion.

He was America’s
richest man when he died at age 74 in 1992. The museum contains Sam’s
simple office, plus the vehicle he drove everyday – a 17-year-old Ford
pick up.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

It's mind-boggling to look at paintings
from the 14th and 15th centuries and think that artists like Leonardo da
Vinci created such vibrant portraits using nothing more than a free
hand and the naked eye -- when just 100 years before, two-point
perspective was unknown. If you're David Hockney, who's been a seminal
figure in modern painting since the 1960s, you literally can't believe
it.

Hockney holds nothing
against his predecessors, but he does have a theory that some used early
optical devices to improve and expand their skills.

The idea first occurred
to him nearly 14 years ago and became the subject of his book Secret
Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters.

Hockney's latest show, A Bigger Exhibition,
hosted by San Francisco's de Young Museum, looks back on the period
since his revelation, highlighting how he's embraced technology ranging
from video cameras to iPads, and integrated them into his art. (The
exhibition's title is a play on Hockney's best-known painting, A Big Splash.)

In 1999, a long-standing
and well known fascination with new media led Hockney to his
controversial suspicions. Visiting the retrospective of a 19th century
French artist, he noticed uncanny technical similarities to drawings
that Andy Warhol had traced from slide-projected photographs.

Knowing that the tools
Warhol had used clearly weren't available in the 1800's, Hockney began
researching. It wasn't long before he came across camera lucida, a small
prism mounted at the end of a metal arm that enables an artist to
refract an image onto their paper. The device received a patent in 1807.
Bingo.

The discovery was enough
to prompt Hockney to expand his investigation, which quickly grew in
scope and size. By the end of his study he'd created The Great Wall, a
staggering arrangement of pictures organized chronologically from left
to right, and geographically from top to bottom, charting of the
evolution of western art across time and space. He used the Wall to
trace this history of optical aids, identifying 1420 as the trend's
likely genesis.

Shown publicly for the
first time at the de Young, the 8-by-72-foot behemoth is the ultimate
testament to Hockney's obsession with technology's influence on fine
art. It's obvious that tools like camera lucida made creating realistic
artwork easier.

But Hockney's broader
concern, which he's explored extensively throughout his career, is how
technology has allowed artists to experiment with new perspectives, and
thus create new ways of considering the world around them.

Where Jan van Eyck might
have used convex mirrors to create a larger field of view on his
canvas, Hockney turns to a modern equivalent: video cameras. Tucked
among the rows of hanging paintings and sketches, four large sets of
nine LED screens roll footage of the same country road, each in one of
the four seasons.

To make the piece,
titled Woldgate Woods, Hockney mounted nine cameras on an SUV and while a
studio assistant drove, he directed another who controlled each shot
individually. The result is a video collage that's synchronized in
timing, but visually unaligned -- a choice he hoped would challenge the
viewer's understanding of perspective, encouraging them to explore each
screen and become an active participant in the work.

Unsurprisingly, you can
find more evidence of technological inspiration all over A Bigger
Exhibition. Walking through the seemingly endless space devoted to the
exhibit -- the largest in the museum's history -- it's seemingly in more
places than not.

From towering
12-foot-tall prints of iPad drawings to rolling flat screens depicting
each of his digital brushstrokes, Hockney's eye has remained steady
while his tools have changed -- making you wonder what will be next in
his arsenal

Monday, December 16, 2013

He is one of the most influential figures in the Canadian
art world, but the road that Marc Mayer took to get there was certainly
off the beaten track.

Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada, in front of David Altmejd’s “The Vessel” (Photo: Jessica Deeks)

by John Allemang

Marc Mayer, BA’84, has something he wants to get off his chest.
“It’s my dirty little secret,” says the director of the National
Gallery, sounding nothing like a man who’s inclined to be secretive.
Mayer is in the attention-getting business: Since 2009, he’s run the
country’s premier art museum with a look-at-me style that makes no
concession to the traditions of public-servant reticence.
When the onetime high-school dropout describes his career trajectory,
he talks about chasing tips as a Toronto waiter and haunting the
eighties Berlin disco scene as if those were key incubators of Ottawa
officialdom. The well-travelled veteran of the contemporary art scene
doesn’t think twice about characterizing his preferred milieu as “a snob
magnet.” Free speech is in his blood.
So what’s left to confess?
“I’m an aesthete,” says the Sudbury, Ontario, native in his best conspiratorial voice. “I live for beauty and its pleasures.”
If anyone is going to win over Ottawa to rampant hedonism, it’s this
animated 57-year-old who found his way to the McGill art history program
as a self-taught mature student. His own life bears witness to the
power of conversion: because Marc Mayer turned himself into an aesthete,
you too can do the same.

Jargon is the enemy

A
viewer looks at “Eco” by Omero Leyva during a media preview of Sakahàn:
International Indigenous Art. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

“My goal is to create art lovers,” he says, almost as if that were an
unusual priority in a museum director. “It’s not obvious to people how
that can happen to you. You’re not born an art lover – I certainly
don’t think I was – but it does happen to you at some point. So we have
to find ways to attract people to this building, not just to talk to
them about art history and point to these objects, but to give them many
different reasons, social reasons, to come to the gallery. And once we
get new people using the museum, we’re going to start making advocates
for the art and people are going to start falling in love with these
objects.”
The gallery as hangout – it doesn’t sound like the strategy of an
aesthete, but Mayer’s reversed understanding of artistic discovery is
that it can begin with basic human needs. Create a gallery bar where
people feel happy talking, and the art around them will become part of
their comfort zone. Culture, even official culture, doesn’t happen in
isolation, and it doesn’t need elaborate interpretation by curatorial
high priests to reach the people it was meant for.
“We take labels off the wall if they’re incomprehensible,” Mayer says
about his plain-speaking regime, “and we replace them with labels that
can be understood. I like the French term, vulgarisateur, meaning
someone who can take complex ideas and simplify them without denaturing
them, without lessening their import by oversimplification. That’s a
skill curators need to have more and more.”
The populist approach could be seen to suit a Conservative government
that’s uncomfortable with notions of cultural elitism – particularly if
his dreams of a smart gallery bar (and restaurant and bookstore) can
generate income and take some pressure off the public purse. But Mayer
isn’t playing to the political crowd so much as appealing to his own
artistic instincts.
“I’ve been looking at art since I was a child, and at some point I
started reading less and looking more. I was scared away by discourse
and jargon; I thought, I’m never going to be an art lover if I have to
read this stuff and understand it.”
The esoteric, exclusionary side of the art world has always bothered
him. “I came to art differently,” he says, “and so I take a different
approach.”
Mayer’s approach certainly caught the attention of Ottawa’s mandarin
class when he took over the gallery’s directorship from the aloof Pierre
Theberge in 2009. “Marc began with some of the style and verve of an
enfant terrible, speaking brashly with quick and loud laughter,” says
Victor Rabinovitch, BA’68, the former CEO of the Canadian Museum of
Civilization who now chairs the board of Ottawa’s Opera Lyra. “He
projected a watch- me message, saying that he would liven up the NGC
from its seemingly quiet, academically rooted ways.”

The dropout finds his passion

Marc Mayer (Photo: Jessica Deeks)

He came by that style honestly, since his first intense aesthetic
explorations took place not in some hallowed gallery but in Toronto’s
vast modern reference library. “I was a very frustrated, intellectually
ambitious high-school dropout who wanted to know how the world worked,”
Mayer recalls. The library for him was a sort of prototype for his
notion of the cultural hangout – a social centre with resources that
could be life-changing for those who exercised their curiosity.
His education to that point had been highly imperfect. He’d skipped a
grade and then been held back in primary school, never successfully
learned to tell time until he was a teenager, remade himself into the
class clown as a way to deal with the daily boredom of the classroom and
was eventually felled by his extramural social distractions: “Sex,
drugs, rock and roll etc.,” as he enumerates them.
He dropped out and started over as a waiter in Toronto. He found the
work highly satisfying, and it remains a formative part of his
worldview. “You develop a certain sang-froid and a dedication to
service. At the end of the day you’ve got a pocketful of money because
you’ve earned all these tips. But the thing you feel most rewarded by is
that you’ve fed all these people.”
In his free time, he explored the library, systematically working his
way through photography and history magazines, reading madly in all
directions. A friend decided to channel his enthusiasm and pointed him
toward a university program for adult dropouts. The winning sales
pitch, Mayer says, was “you’re no longer the child, you’re the client.”
Client-based education delighted the intellectually ambitious
autodidact, and he eventually worked his way to Montreal and McGill.
“McGill was a wonderful experience for me,” he says. “I love the fact
that in those days they took the classical approach. You had to read
the Bible and the Iliad to get through art history, you had to study
foreign languages – I learned German and Italian.”
He actually set out to be a pure historian, but then got a taste of
art history and found himself torn. Professor Winthrop Judkins, who’d
established the rigorous art history program three decades earlier, took
on the role of decider.
“I was one of his last students,” Mayer recalls. “He just looked at
me and said, ‘You’re so good, stick with us. Don’t be a jack of all
trades, and master of none; you’ll be a terrific art historian.’ And he
was right: I was much more interested in objects that remained from the
past than documents from the past. I’m more a looker than a reader.”

Old and new

Mayer’s career has been so predisposed to the present – with stints
at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, the Power Plant in Toronto, the
Brooklyn Museum, the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal – that his
intense devotion to the past may come as a surprise. In the cerebral
gallery world, there’s generally a friction between contemporary and
historical, but Mayer’s pleasure-driven aesthetic has made him a
unifying force.
“My cast of mind is such that I’m always trying to make connections,
trying to understand material culture and humanity through art. Art is
history and it’s also information. I find I’m a little unusual among
the curators I’ve worked with in that I’m very passionate about Old
Masters, I love African art, I love Chinese ceramics. Material culture
to me is an endless cornucopia of fascination. But contemporary art is
the most meaningful because I can actually know the creators, I can
affect their thinking through our friendship.”
It was at McGill that he came to realize the boundlessness of art
history. His passion was the Italian Baroque and his hero was a
17th-century polymath from Turin named Guarino Guarini – architect,
playwright, philosopher, monk, master of geometry. “He made the most
complex buildings you could imagine,” Mayer says. “Art historians
ignored them because they were too complex to describe.”
The degree of difficulty intrigued him. “I decided that I was the guy
to explain Guarini and the Italian Baroque by chaos theory and
fractals,” he says, both amused and fascinated by the intense academic
boldness of his younger self.
And then a new world opened up. The young historian liked to spend
free time challenging himself at the Musée d’art contemporain, staring
at everything, understanding nothing. He came across a painting by
Jean-Michel Basquiat, a fellow high school dropout whose
graffiti-inspired work was the subject of an exhibition Mayer later
curated at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Here was someone who was world-famous and he was actually younger
than me. It was the moment when I realized that a painting hanging in a
museum could be something being made today by someone who’s living and
experiencing the same world you’re experiencing.”
The power of that personal discovery remains with him at the National
Gallery. When he goes hunting for art to acquire, he says immodestly,
“I’m looking for that key work in the artist’s corpus that’s going to
open a whole new world for you and your life.”
Given his background, he has a soft spot for the kind of contemporary
art likely to win over traditionalists who insist the only good art is
old art. He points proudly to such acquisitions as Sophie Ristelhueber’s
71 large-format photographs of the aftermath of the First Gulf
War, Yang Fudong’s five-part film Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (“probably the most famous Chinese video art”) and Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer’s 120-foot long Leaves of Grass, which features 16,000 images cut out from old editions of Life magazine, mounted on grass sticks.
When calculating what to acquire, he starts with his gut instinct,
that nagging feeling of desire that “makes you wake up, sit bolt upright
in the middle of the night and say ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to buy that.’”
The aesthetic rush is paramount – curatorial justification comes later.
He had that feeling with Farmer’s work. But he also had it with a
more conventional painting by the French artist Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
It’s an unfinished erotic work that was commissioned by the Empress
Josephine just before she was divorced by Napoleon and bears the winning
title Love Seduces Innocence, Pleasure Entraps, Remorse Follows – “the story of everyone’s life,” Mayer notes.

A tough nut to crack

Designed
by Moshe Safdie, BArch’61, LLD’82, the National Gallery is a familiar
part of the Ottawa landscape (Photo: National Gallery)

The gallery under his leadership has drawn crowds with blockbuster
collaborations on Van Gogh and Caravaggio, but he and his team have
received the most kudos for “Sakahan,” an exhibition of contemporary
indigenous art from Canada and 15 other countries. “It was an immensely
high-minded endeavour to undertake,” says Globe and Mail art
critic Sarah Milroy, BA’79, “really bold and expensive and risky. I
don’t know that shows like that get huge foot traffic, but there’s no
denying they’re the right thing to do.”
Indeed, the 2013 summer show drew barely 60,000 visitors compared to
the 230,000 who attended the previous year’s Van Gogh event. “Marc has
encountered the hard financial realities of popular shows versus
important shows,” Rabinovitch observes. Contemporary art remains a hard
sell – at least in Ottawa, in tourist season.
“It’s a challenge,” admits Mayer. “This is a museum that’s two or
three times bigger than a city the size of Ottawa would support if it
wasn’t a museum meant to serve the whole country. It’s the toughest of
nuts to crack: How do you serve the whole country from Ottawa and still
be very appealing to the people who live here?”
Partnerships with regional Canadian galleries have become part of the
solution. But money, lots of it, remains the best way to solve the
National Gallery’s awkward problems of scale. “These are tough times
for art museums,” Mayer acknowledges, and the generally bleak economic
climate during his tenure has been exacerbated by the need to
reconstruct the gallery’s aging Great Hall – responding to the recession
and the need to modernize, he has chosen to cut jobs in education,
library services, communications, security and IT.
But Mayer is at heart an optimist and an enthusiast, not a man who
likes to bear bad news with a long face. Others might take issue with
the federal government’s commitment to the finer arts, but he happily
says, “I’m not frustrated by politics in Ottawa.”
His funding has held steady, there’s been no interference on the
artistic side, and when he wants to share his anxieties about, say, the
fragile tourism market in Ottawa, he finds a willing ear in Heritage
Minister Shelly Glover.
In return, he looks for ways to make a venerable cultural institution more responsive to contemporary needs and desires.
“The thing that’s important to me and in line with the thinking in
Ottawa,” he says, “is that the gallery has to pull its own weight as
much as possible.” Hence his hopeful thoughts about repositioning the
gallery as a place to have a beautiful meal and a brilliant conversation
– and his willingness, bordering on eagerness, to court wealthy donors.
“I’m much more involved in fundraising than my predecessor was,” he says. “I actually enjoy it.”
As the man said, he lives for pleasure.

John Allemang is a feature writer for the Globe and Mail.

Mayer on some masterworks

We invited Marc Mayer to tell us a
little about some of his favourite items in the National Gallery’s
extensive collection. Here are two of the works that he feels a special
connection to. The photos are by Jessica Deeks.

Court
makes me think of Marie-Antoinette, or rather the vile retort
misattributed to her that I would paraphrase as: “Let them eat sports.”
I’m usually not a fan of one-liners in art, but the socio-economic point
Jungen makes by turning sweatshop sewing tables into a basketball court
is so important, the lengths he has gone to make the point so extreme,
the work’s coherence within the context of his larger project so
seamless, that it meets my definition of brilliant.

The Vessel
describes swans and describes a description of swans, but I don’t want
to venture too much further because I want to keep savoring the awe of
first glance. I’ve been looking at this wonder for the first time, over
and over, for two years now. With art, the real work of pleasure is in
your head as you analyze the details, testing and retesting your initial
intuition against your knowledge and expectations. The process has
risks for the work, of course. Are you really standing in front of
something profound or is it just special effects? Though I don’t fear
the answer, it’s a testament to Altmejd’s power that I’m not ready to
ask that question yet.

It stinks! Art critic Julian Spalding was banned
from Damien Hirst's Tate exhibition after calling him a talentless
conman... but we smuggled him in - and here's his verdict

By
Julian Spalding

There is no party more tantalising
than one you’re banned from. It was in that spirit that I joined the
100-strong throng outside the Tate Modern art gallery in London on
Thursday to see the Damien Hirst exhibition. But while my fellow queuers
were buzzing in anticipation of Hirst’s dots, pills and those dead
animals, I was just relieved I hadn’t been barred by the bouncers. That’s
exactly what happened when I tried to visit the exhibition earlier this
week with a BBC camera crew in tow. Dozens of reporters and cameramen
swept into the press screening, but my film crew and I weren’t allowed
past the door. As
former Director of the Glasgow Museums and author of five art books,
I’ve been welcomed into hundreds of galleries around the world, but a
feature I wrote for last week’s Mail on Sunday must have touched a nerve
with the Tate’s bosses and earned me a place on their blacklist.

Sinking feeling: Julian Spalding contemplates Hirst's shark in formaldehyde at the Tate Modern

I had dared to say what many of
my colleagues secretly think: Con Art, the so-called Conceptual Art
movement, is little more than a money-spinning con, rather like the
emperor’s new clothes. That goes for the ‘artist’ Carl Andre who sold a
stack of bricks for £2,297. It goes for Marcel Duchamp, whose old
‘urinal’ was bought by the Tate for $500,000 (about £300,000). It goes
for Tracey Emin’s grubby old bed. And, of course, it goes for Damien
Hirst. I was
determined to set aside my preconceptions and experience the Damien
Hirst retrospective, which opened on Wednesday and will close in
September. I’ve long believed him to be a money-hungry charlatan but as
the richest living artist at the age of 46, he must be doing something
right.

He was worth £215 million in
2010, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, and he pulls in visitor
numbers each day that many galleries would be lucky to draw in a month,
so surely I’ve been unfair.Yet
four hours later I emerged from the exhibition weary, miserable and
desperate to clear the lingering stench of rotten cow from my nose. Were
there not a Tate fatwa stamped on my head, I might have stood in front
of the hundreds still queuing to pay the £14 admission and shouted:
‘Stop.’ Of course,
people should decide for themselves. But judging by the surly
expressions of those dripping out, I wasn’t the only one left feeling
drained – and conned. In
a series of conversations, I found out what propels people, many of
whom rarely visit art galleries, to queue for 60 minutes for this
marketing circus. ‘Is it art?’ I asked and pointed at a shark preserved
in formaldehyde, a wall of dots, and flies feasting on a dead cow’s
head.

Defining work: The artist with Mother and Child
Divided, which comprises a cow and a calf cut in half and preserved in
formaldehyde. The work is part of the Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate
Modern, London, which runs from April 5 to September 9

‘Of course it is, it’s a Damien
Hirst.’ One plummy-voiced blonde accompanied by a gaggle of children
looked offended that I’d dared to ask. But why is it art? ‘Because it
makes you feel something.’ When I asked what it makes them feel, most
referred me to the guidebook explanations.What
quickly becomes apparent is that it is like a religion. Everyone is
strangely committed to the cult of Hirst – but few can articulate what
is fantastic about a soggy, sad-looking shark, preserved in a vitrine
with all the menace of a sagging sofa. Created
by a Turner Prize winning artist, the dead tiger shark, grandly named
The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living,
should be one of the great artworks of the last century, yet most
visitors spent less than three seconds looking at it. What
is also striking is the way disoriented visitors drift around the
gallery. Traditionally, in exhibitions of ‘real art’, visitors cluster
around the paintings or sculptures while the rest of the gallery is
empty. The Hirst
exhibition is another matter. People mill about like unmagnetised iron
filings. Why? Nobody is engaged. One enormous spot painting is half
hidden behind a formaldehyde-preserved cow.Smaller
vitrines containing skulls are dumped on the floor at random. A young
boy trips over one and stops to look at it. ‘Why are you looking at
that? It’s revolting,’ I say. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ the boy’s mother replies. ‘I have strange children.’In
fact, the only exhibit in the main exhibition (for the diamond skull is
shown separately) drawing a large crowd is a cordoned-off room called
In And Out Of Love, which contains exotic butterflies and bowls of
fruit. Nobody in the 40-deep queue looks at the spot paintings on the
nearby wall or the Ikea-style desk with an overflowing ashtray on it.

'Is it art?': Hirst's 1986 piece Spot Painting,
household gloss on board. Julian Spalding says those he spoke to
struggled to explain what was so special about the works on show

Thirty minutes later, we reach
the front, and are granted two minutes’ access to a small humid room of
butterflies, a lot less impressive than the Butterfly House at Berkeley
Castle – which costs only £3.50 to visit.This
confusion begins in the first room. Few people notice the first
exhibit, Kitchen Cupboard, a shiny orange Formica unit made in 1987. ‘Is
it a fire extinguisher case or part of the show?’ asks one baffled man.
Nobody answers because nobody else is looking at it. Few
pause at the grubby spot painting leaning carelessly against a wall.
Worse, the glass case containing a string of limp sausages,
imaginatively entitled ‘Sausages’, is held together with grubby gaffer
tape. Whoever was
responsible for refreshing the paintings with butterflies didn’t notice
that a butterfly’s abdomen has fallen away and the wings disintegrated. One
of the only exhibits to sustain visitors’ attention for more than a
couple of seconds is a grotesque black-and-white photograph taken in
1981. In it, Hirst grins and holds up a severed head with an uncanny
resemblance to Sir Winston Churchill. Back then, Hirst was a sixth-form
student. He scored an E-grade in A-level art and later wormed his way on
to the Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, University of London, after first
being rejected. Tellingly, the Tate has excluded Hirst’s paintings.
Quite simply, Hirst can’t paint. It
was at Goldsmiths that he met Charles Saatchi, who would propel him
from chancer to millionaire before they parted company in 2003 after a
disagreement over the way Hirst’s works were staged at Saatchi’s
gallery. Around that
time, Hirst admitted: ‘I can’t wait to get into a position to make
really bad art and get away with it.’ Which raises the question: is he
consciously playing us for fools?

I put this to an accountant from
Norwich, who was gazing intently at a wall of preserved fish that could
have been plucked from the Natural History Museum. ‘I like the fact that
Hirst put the skinned animal skulls next to the fish, which have skin,’
says Giles Kerkham. When I inform him that Hirst has amassed £215 million from such juxtapositions, he concedes, ‘No one’s worth that.’ ‘Think
of all the hungry people in the world you could feed with that,’ says
teaching assistant Kathryn Gynn as we stand in front of For The Love Of
God, a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds that was reportedly sold for
£50 million. But it is
the rotting cow head, called A Thousand Years, that I can’t bear to
look at. Blood trickles out of it, swarms of flies feast on it and the
horrific stench is pumped into the gallery. ‘It’s very macabre,’ says
Craig Thurlby. What an understatement. ‘I interpret the flies and cow as
life and death, so I guess it has meaning and stuff,’ says Craig. ‘Isn’t Hirst just playing us for fools?’ I explode. ‘Probably,’ agrees Craig. ‘If he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.’Standing
next to him, two young men shake their heads. ‘I don’t like any of it,’
one says. So why did they come? ‘We just wanted to see what everyone’s
raving about.’ The same goes for a Moroccan tourist who hadn’t heard of Hirst until today. His reaction? ‘It’s not very nice.’I bump into the same two young men at the sausages. ‘What’s Hirst’s meaning?’ I ask them. ‘Maybe he was hungry.’ I can’t imagine a more accurate answer. One
wonders why Hirst even agreed to be shown in the Tate. After all, in an
interview in 1996, he said: ‘Museums are for dead artists. I’d never
show my work in the Tate.’ Dead
artists, indeed. For Hirst’s most loyal cult followers might champion
this exhibition as his mid-career celebration, but the shrewder ones can
see through his nonsensical cons. They see the truth: that Hirst, at
46, has reached the realms of dead artists. And this exhibition is his
grubby, inglorious obituary.

Julian
Spalding is an independent curator and museums consultant. His book Con
Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can is
available via Amazon Kindle.

Subscribe To

Followers

Follow by Email

Facebook Badge

welcome to my life

Being a painter is not a choice. It is not a chosen
profession. Painting is a compulsion. It is a need like breathing or eating. If
fact it regularly supersedes both. There is no choice in whether or not I will
paint only the when and often not even that. Away from the studio I think about
the canvas that sits there unfinished, calling to me, challenging me, maddening
me.